March 18-29, 2015

The Great Man

U.S. Premiere | Q&A with director Sarah Leonor

The intrinsic struggle between paternal/fraternal responsibility and unfettered mobility takes on a deeply moving dimension in Sarah Leonor’s by turns heartbreaking and empowering sophomore feature, which follows two French Legionnaires at the end of their posting in Afghanistan.

Screenings:

Los Hongos

Q&A with director Oscar Ruiz Navia

Full of vibrant color and great music, Los Hongos is a charming and surprising coming-of-age film that follows Cali street artists Ras and Calvin, good friends from disparate class backgrounds who band together with other artists to paint a tribute to the student protestors of the Arab Spring.

Screenings:

The Creation of Meaning

U.S. Premiere

Though its title arcs toward grand philosophical inquiry, the stirring power of Simone Rapisarda Casanova’s documentary-fiction hybrid—winner of the Best Emerging Director prize at Locarno—lies in its intimacy of detail and wry political observation, filmed with a painterly Renaissance beauty in Tuscany’s remote Apennine mountains.

Screenings:

Tu dors Nicole

Q&A with director Stéphane Lafleur

This disarmingly atmospheric comedy, following the summer (mis)adventures of a band of utterly unique characters and shot in low-contrast black-and-white 35mm, is Québécois director Stéphane Lafleur’s ode to restless youth that recalls the likes of Aki Kaurismäki and Jim Jarmusch.

Screenings:

Fort Buchanan

North American Premiere | Q&A with director Benjamin Crotty

Shot in richly textured 16mm, Benjamin Crotty’s queer soap opera chronicles the tragicomic plight of frail, lonely Roger, who seeks comfort and companionship from the sexually frustrated army wives in a remote military post in the woods while his husband carries out a mission in Djibouti. Screening with Taprobana (Gabriel Abrantes, 24m).

Screenings:

The Diary of a Teenage Girl

Opening Night | Q&A with director Marielle Heller

Winner of a Special Jury Prize for Excellence in Cinematography at Sundance, this adaptation of Phoebe Gloeckner’s illustrated novel, set in 1970s San Francisco, features stunning newcomer Bel Powley as a 15-year-old girl whose sexual awakening involves having an affair with her mother’s boyfriend (Alexander Skarsgård).

Screenings:

Entertainment

Closing Night | Q&A with director Rick Alverson

The Comedy director Rick Alverson teams with comedians Gregg Turkington (better known as Neil Hamburger) and Tim Heidecker for a hallucinatory journey to the end of the night. A washed-up comic on tour with a teenage mime works his way across the Mojave Desert on a one-of-a-kind odyssey that is by turns mortifying and beautiful, bewildering and absorbing.

Screenings:

The Kindergarten Teacher

Q&A with director Nadav Lapid

Nadav Lapid’s follow-up to his explosive debut, Policeman, is a brilliant, shape-shifting provocation in which a fortysomething teacher in Tel Aviv becomes obsessed with one of her charges, a 5-year-old poetry prodigy, yielding a perversely romantic work whose underlying conviction seems to be that in an ugly world, beauty still has the power to drive us mad. Screening with Why? (Nadav Lapid, 5m).

Screenings:

The Tribe

Set it in a spartan boarding school for deaf and mute coeds and told entirely through un-subtitled sign language, Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy’s Cannes Critics’ Week Grand Prize–winning feature debut overcomes what may sound like impossible obstacles to tell a grim but uncannily immersive story of exploitation and brutality in a dog-eat-dog world, delivering a high-school movie you won’t forget.

Screenings:

Listen to Me Marlon

Q&A with director Stevan Riley

Documentarian Stevan Riley explores the on- and off-screen lives of Marlon Brando, using a vast trove of audio recordings made by the actor himself to allow Brando to tell his own story, filled with bones to pick, strong opinions, and fascinating traces of one of the most alluring figures in the history of cinema.

New Directors/New Films is presented by The Museum of Modern Art and the Film Society of Lincoln Center and is supported by Kenneth Kuchin, The Junior Associates of The Museum of Modern Art, The Film Society's New Wave, The New York Times, American Airlines, and Stella Artois.